Sir John Beddington said climate change is one of the things he has been trying to bring to the Government’s attention but believes it is not talked about enough. He also noted the climate and weather we’re experiencing now comes from greenhouse gases that were in the atmosphere 25 years ago.

He said the international community’s failure to agree binding targets for cutting carbon emissions meant problems were being stored up for the future. He told BBC Radio 4: “They may reach agreement and they may start to reduce greenhouse gases in the next five years, or it may be a little longer. But they are still climbing and when that increase is reversed, we will be left with the weather and the climate for the next 25 years from whenever that happens.”

Editor’s Note: The following letter by Dr Colin Summerhayes and the response by Professors Bob Carter and Vincent Courtillot are a continuation of their debate on The Geological Perspective of Global Warming which the GWPF published on 14 February. Dr Summerhayes’ letters have also been published by the Geological Society. We welcome this scientific exchange and hope that readers will find it both enlightening and encouraging.

Dr Colin P. Summerhayes, Scott Polar Research Institute, Cambridge

Dear Dr Peiser,

Thank you for the opportunity to respond to the critique by Drs Carter and Courtillot of my note of 14/2/13 on “The Geological Perspective of Global Warming”. I initially wrote to you to draw attention to Geological Society of London’s statement on this topic, because the geological perspective is usually overlooked in discussions about climate change, and it should not be. But, because Drs Carter and Courtillot moved the debate out of just the geological arena, I am responding in my own capacity, not as a representative of the GSL.

Drs Carter and Courtillot took exception to my use of the phrase “The cooling [of the past 50 million years] was directly associated with a decline in the amount of CO2 in the atmosphere”, saying that correlation was not causation. True. What I should have said was “The cooling of the past 50 million years was driven by a decline in CO2 in the atmosphere.” Prior to the Ice Age of the last 2.6 million years the amount of CO2 in the atmosphere resulted from the interplay between the emission of CO2 by volcanoes and its absorption by the weathering of rocks, especially in mountainous areas, as well as by sequestration in sediments. Methods to determine the likely concentration of CO2 in the atmosphere in the geological past have improved in recent years. They include the numbers of pores (stomata) on leaves, the abundance of the mineral nahcolite (stable above concentrations of 1000 ppm CO2), and the carbon isotopic composition of alkenones from marine plankton. Methods for determining global temperature through time have also improved. We now know that the Eocene was a time of greater volcanic output of CO2, and that the rise of major mountain chains after that time pulled CO2 out of the atmosphere. Geochemical models of the carbon cycle simulate the decline in CO2 after the middle Eocene. Convergence between the CO2 data and the output from those models provide confidence that we understand the process. There is no geologically plausible alternative. We are not talking about a loose association where there is uncertainty about cause as Drs Carter and Courtillot imply. Indeed, even Drs Carter and Courtillot accept that CO2 is a greenhouse gas, and that accumulation of greenhouse gas in the atmosphere warms it. Likewise, its loss will cool the atmosphere.

London, 22 February: The Global Warming Policy Foundation (GWPF) welcomes that Dr Rajenda Pachauri, the chair of the United Nations Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), has acknowledged the reality of the post-1997 standstill in global average temperatures. (see interview with Dr Pachauri in The Australian 22 February).

The GWPF has been highlighting the global warming standstill for many years against fervent denial by climate activists. Recently, Nasa’s James Hansen also recognised that global temperatures have not risen for more than a decade.

“Even though the scientific case for the standstill is secure, and well represented in peer-reviewed scientific literature, it will surely help the climate debate now that the IPCC chairman has confirmed its existence,” said Dr David Whitehouse, the GWPF’s science editor.

The post-1997 global annual average temperature standstill is one of the most important aspects of current climate science. Its recognition by the chair of the IPCC means there is now growing pressure that this empirical fact will receive full analysis in the forthcoming AR5 report.

The GWPF points out that Dr Pachauri’s assertion that it will take a temperature standstill of “30-40 years at least” to affect theories of man-made global warming is without a scientific basis. “The 17-year standstill already strains climate models, and if it continues for much longer it will demonstrate that the climate models on which the IPCC has based its assumptions are inadequate,” Dr Whitehouse said.

Dr Colin P. Summerhayes, Vice-President of the Geological Society of London

Dear Dr Peiser,

In the interest of contributing to the evidence-based debate on climate change I thought it would be constructive to draw to your attention the geological evidence regarding climate change, and what it means for the future. This evidence was published in November 2010 by the Geological Society of London in a document entitled “Climate Change: Evidence from the Geological Record”, which can be found on the Society’s web page.

A variety of techniques is now available to document past levels of CO2 in the atmosphere, past global temperatures, past sea levels, and past levels of acidity in the ocean. What the record shows is this. The Earth’s climate has been cooling for the past 50 million years from 6-7°C above today’s global average temperatures to what we see now. That cooling led to the formation of ice caps on Antarctica 34 million years ago and in the northern hemisphere around 2.6 million years ago. The cooling was directly associated with a decline in the amount of CO2 in the atmosphere. In effect we moved from a warm “greenhouse climate” when CO2, temperature and sea level were high, and there were no ice caps, to an “icehouse climate” in which CO2, temperature and sea level are low, and there are ice caps. The driver of that change is the balance between the emission of CO2 into the atmosphere from volcanoes, and the mopping up of CO2 from the atmosphere by the weathering of rocks, especially in mountains. There was more volcanic activity in the past and there are more mountains now.

Global warming is not causing temperatures to rise as quickly as previously feared, the Met Office has claimed.

Today the weather agency released its revised forecast which was quickly seized upon by climate change skeptics who used the data to claim global warming has stopped.

In turn, the scientific community accused them of ignoring the weight of evidence showing that global warming is a reality, and accused the Met Office of 'falling short' of the standards expected of it.

The UK's national weather service recently changed its projections for climate change through to 2017, known as 'decadal forecasting', to show a marked difference to the rate at which the world's temperature will climb.

Mankind must go green or die, says Prince Charles – The Prince of Wales has warned that mankind is on the brink of “committing suicide on a grand scale” unless urgent progress is made in tackling green issues such as carbon dioxide (CO2) emissions, intensive farming and resource depletion.

Adopting uncharacteristically apocalyptic language, the Prince said the world was heading towards a “terrifying point of no return” and that future generations faced an “unimaginable future” on a toxic planet.

In a pre-recorded speech broadcast in acceptance of an lifetime environmental achievement award, the Prince said green views that had once seen him written off as a “crank” were now backed by hard evidence.

He told the gala ceremony for the 7th International Green Awards at Battersea Power Station in London that fossil fuels and supplies of fresh water were under pressure while the stability of weather patterns was threatened and “vast amounts of CO2” were still pumped into the atmosphere. “Humanity and the Earth will soon begin to suffer some very grim consequences,” he said.

Met Office figures show that the average temperature between 1997 and 2012 did not rise at all and that the previous warming trend has levelled off. But critics say the Met Office put this research onto the Internet without publicity - in contrast to the attention it gave to figures released six months ago which reinforced the case for global warming.

Those figures went up to 2010 - the hottest year on record - and showed a continuing warming trend.

Campaigners yesterday slammed the Met Office tactics and questioned the Government's drive for costly green energy such as wind turbines which add about £100 a year to domestic energy bills.

In light of Britain’s struggling economy, it is becoming increasingly evident that the passion for green control and command policies is coming to its predictable end. Saving jobs and the economy is now the uppermost priority for Britain and most other European countries.

David Cameron has promised to end his government’s “dithering” and “paralysis”. As part of this, yesterday’s reshuffle was intended to kick-start new initiatives for reviving Britain’s flagging economy.

One of the key political battle grounds in coming months will be the growing divergence between an outdated green agenda and a new push for environmental deregulation and economic growth.

George Osborne has signalled that the UK should no longer place too much emphasis on renewable energy and is openly advocating a dash for gas. The government is widely expected to give the green light for the extraction of shale gas. The only question is how much longer we will have to wait.

SIR – In your special report on the Arctic (“The melting north”, June 16th) you said polar bears are “struggling” and it is “nonsense” that they are thriving. Anything other than a cursory reading of the data shows no such thing.

According to the International Union for Conservation of Nature estimates, polar bear numbers are at least twice as high as in the 1960s. Of the eight populations said to be decreasing, the official data table and map produced by the Polar Bear Specialist Group shows that two are only “thought” or “believed” to be declining entirely due to hunting; four are in decline only according to computer models, despite some claims by “traditional ecological knowledge” (ie, locals) that they are thriving; one has more than doubled but is now said to be “currently declining” because of crowding; and one showed a real decline that has recently been reversed. Meanwhile, the four populations you described as unknown include the huge Barents Sea population, which has seen dramatic increase in sightings, damage to huts and devastation of barnacle goose colonies on the west coast of Svalbard, all prima facie evidence of “thriving”. There is a strong smell of “policy-based evidence making” here.

Since the 1970s the population of white whales around Svalbard has increased, as have walrus and barnacle geese numbers. Protection from hunting has had, and is likely to have, a much bigger impact on Arctic wildlife than climate trends.

The integrity of Western media depends on whether they encourage critique and fault-finding analysis - or whether they will drift more and more towards gullible campaign journalism.

Should critics of renewable energy be allowed to voice their objections in the opinion pages of newspapers? Doesn't the protest against eco-taxes or the attack on wind and solar energy subsidies (and the redistribution of wealth from poor to rich that follows), contravene the media's core principle of "accurate, fair and balanced reporting", as green energy lobbyists complain?

And what about climate sceptics? Should they be permitted to express their doubts in the comments pages of newspapers? After all, probing the conventional wisdom about global warming has been branded as "deliberately misleading" by green campaigners who claim that any scepticism of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change consensus is violating the principle of the media's own code of conduct.

The former climate change adviser, Ross Garnaut, has lamented that balanced reporting of climate change has seriously undermined the drive for political action: "If you take our mainstream media, it will often seek to provide some balance between people who base their views on the mainstream science and people who don't. That's a very strange sort of balance. It's a balance of words, and not a balance of scientific authority."

» How much "Man Made" CO2 Is In The Earth's Atmosphere?
I think ALL of the CO2 in the Earth's Atmosphere is from man.
I'm not sure how much "Man Made" CO2 is in the Earth's Atmosphere.
There is .04% CO2 in the Earth's Atmosphere and of that "Man" has added an extra 4% (1 part in 62,500)